My Account, Microsoft’s Business Account Portal

Team: 3 Engineering Teams, 3 Designers, PM Focus: UX Design

My Account needed to become a self-service account management portal for employees at over 350,000 businesses using Azure, but that entailed dozens of new self-service features shipping in parallel in a fast-moving enterprise setting with no formal user research cycles.

My role was to design approximately 60% of the portal, spanning profile management, app access, group membership, authentication, and permissions, while making it feel like one coherent product.

User Problem & Business Need

My Account sits at an awkward intersection: it’s an IT product that non-IT people have to use.

Before the redesign, employees had no real self-service options. Need app access? Submit a ticket. Want to join a group? Submit a ticket. Many routine account tasks ran through the helpdesk. This was slow for employees waiting on simple requests as well as a drain on IT teams.

The old portal reflected the problem, light on features with little for an employee to do themselves.

The redesign’s mandate was to give employees the tools to handle their own accounts, and get IT out of the loop for the requests that don’t need them.

Mapping a Sprawling Portal

The first challenge was structural. Four distinct feature areas (profile, apps, groups, and access) needed to feel like one product. I mapped the full scope using a “wireframe sitemap” to help stakeholders understand both the hierarchy and the actual experience.

The key structural decision was choosing My Profile as the landing page, with the other sections accessible through a context switcher. My Profile made logical sense as the entry point to the url, “myaccount.microsoft.com”. It orients users before they get into more complex tasks like managing access or group memberships.

A Design System Everyone Can Use

With multiple feature areas shipping in parallel, standards needed to be put in place for visual consistency. I adapted Microsoft’s existing Fluent UI assets into a tailored design system for My Account, adding detailed annotations so the team knew not just what components to use, but when and why.

I also rebuilt the system in PowerPoint. That gave PMs and other non-designers a way to mock up ideas and participate in design conversations without needing Figma access. It cultivated trust and kept the team working from the same visual language.

Spotlight A: My Profile – Orienting Users

Most users landing on My Account are there to do something specific. The profile overview needed to function like a directory to show users where they needed to go.

The solution was a card-based layout with large icons and plain-language descriptions for each section. The most common destinations are surfaced so users can orient and move on quickly.

An early sketch of the “My Profile” UI.

Main Comps Extra Screens

A Devices page lets users manage what devices are tied to their account and disable lost or stolen devices.

A Recent Activity page lets users take action on suspicious sign-ins.

An organizations page lets users sign into any organization their account is affiliated with.

A Privacy page lets users manage which apps access their personal data.

Spotlight B: My Apps – Making Hundreds of Apps Manageable

The existing app experience displayed every application a user had access to in a single flat list. For employees at large organizations, that could mean hundreds of system processes and integrations mixed in with the handful of apps they actually used.

The design challenge was personalization: how do you let users surface what matters to them without adding complexity?

I solved this by letting users create favorite pages. Once a user started their first page, the landing experience for “My Apps” would change from “All Apps” to the user’s first favorite page. Leveraging familiar mobile patterns, the system let users favorite apps with simple drag-and-drop interactions.

The old “My Apps” UI.

Drag & Drop Demo Extra Screens

An example of a favorites page populated with a user’s preferred applications.

The start of a new-user flow. Once the user makes their first page, teaching bubbles explain how to access apps and add favorites.

The mobile UI for a favorites page.

A page for managing which applications store user login and authentication info to speed up launch.

Spotlight C: My Groups – Building Robust Group Management

My Groups was a net-new feature giving employees the ability to create and manage user groups within their organization, functionality that had previously lived exclusively with IT admins.

The challenge was translating inherently complex, data-dense flows into something a non-technical user could navigate confidently. Group management systems have a lot of states, edge cases, and consequential actions. They would need to be designed carefully for My Groups to feel approachable to our non-technical users.

Without formal research cycles, I leaned heavily on heuristic evaluations and design shares to test the flows and catch friction points before they reached users.

Edit Group Description Demo Extra Screens

The Mobile UI for the group member page.

Part of the flow of removing members from a group. Command bar options change when users are selected.

A flyout for taking action on another user’s request to join a group.

Part of the flow for adding users to the group. The users’ search query is auto-completed with people in the same org as them.

Spotlight D: Simple, Secure Authentication

Part of my work on My Account entailed a redesign of Microsoft’s authentication system, creating each of the flows users move through when setting up authentication methods. For our non-technical audience, I used ample white-space and kept each step as simple as possible.

Microsoft had an additional business requirement that each setup flow be surface-able both in the authentication settings menu, and as an interrupt for users whose organizations required them to set up more authentication methods. I addressed this by containing each flow within a dialog box, which could pull double duty appearing over the settings menu or being the focus of the interrupt.

Authenticator App Setup Flow Extra Screens

The Authenticator app setup flow appearing as an interrupt.

Mobile treatment for the Authenticator app interrupt.

The flow for setting up a USB security key as an auth method. This mock-up was shown on-stage at Microsoft Ignite when this method was announced.

The flow for adding phone call or text as an authentication method.

What I Learned

My Account was early work, and looking back there are things I’d do differently.

The biggest is research. Even lightweight interviews or structured heuristic reviews early on would have surfaced friction points before they became design debt. I’ve since learned to push for weekly user research cycles at every role.

The other is exploration depth. Earlier in my career I had a tendency to move toward solutions quickly. The best ideas in this project, like the modal-based auth flows and the mobile home screen pattern for apps. came from pushing past the obvious answer. I’ve learned to stay in the problem space longer before converging, and it consistently produces stronger work.

Visually, this project also reflects where my craft was at the time. My eye for polish, typography, and detail has sharpened considerably since.

What I’m proud of is the systems thinking. Designing coherence across a large portal under real shipping pressure was a hard problem, and I think the structure and consistency of the final product reflects that work well.

Back to Projects